Compellent Technologies Storage Center 3.3

Axxana Phoenix System RP

Disk and disk subsystems

Bronze Award:

Compellent Technologies Storage Center 3.3

If it's high-end features and flexibility you want, look no further than Compellent Technologies' Storage Center 3.3. Despite being a relative newcomer to the midrange array scene, judges were impressed by the number of ways it can be configured, and its long list of standard and add-on applications.

Storage Center 3.3 is drive and host-interface agnostic. You can outfit the array with FC or SATA disks, and with either FC or iSCSI host connectivity, within the same box if you so choose. It supports N-way clustered controllers (but only two today) and capacity scales from 1 TB to 100 TB.

Mixed drive and host-interface types work well with Storage Center 3.3's optional Data Progression feature, a policy-based migration facility that moves data at the block level to optimize performance or archive older data to a more appropriate tier. "This is the first block storage array that automates ILM [information lifecycle management] and moves data between tiers based on user policies," wrote a judge.

Other notable features include Dynamic Capacity -- a kind of thin provisioning; Data Instant Replay, a snapshotting capability; boot-from-SAN support; online volume expansion; and RAID-level migration. The optional Remote Instant Replay is a remote snapshot replication feature.

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